Category checkbox filter for event lists and tables

Hello,

I'm using this very useful event booking component to manage about 180 afternoon activities for a school and I created categories and subcategories to bring some order and focus to the clutter. The user are parents who book activities for their children and they look for specific set of categories which fit for their child. Those are

1. Grades
PP, P1, P2, P3, P4, P5, S1, S2, S3, S4, S5, S6

2. Topics:
Music, Sports, Crafting, Creativity, STEM, Performing

3. Spoken language:
English, French, Spanish, German

4. Recurring Day:
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday

In the frontend a filter or selection system is needed to drill down the relevant events. The search module is nice, but can select only one category at once and you need to go back and fort. Working on a solution myself I try to program a multi-selectable checkbox list which is generated by category arrays and echos the events in the list or table view accordingly to the selected categories. Without reloading the hole page of course like in a shop system would be great. This way it would be neat and fast to browse the many events.

Any idea where to start? I'm just a php beginner but enthusiastic that it couldn't be that difficult to program. May be this multiple selection filter would be highly useful for others too!

Thank you,
Chris

Hi Chris

I would say that it's hard to handle. There are modifications needed in several places:

1. modules/mod_eb_search/mod_eb_search.php . Makes the categories selection become multiple

2. components/com_eventbooking/controller/controller.php, method search. Pass the selected categories to search view

3. components/com_eventbooking/model/search.php: Filter events base on the selected categories

As I said, it would be hard for a beginner, sorry

Tuan

Hi Tuan,

thank you for your message. I had the feeling already that it won't be easy. Is there any other solution how to find the right event for a user if there are 100+ events in the database?

The school I'm working for offers music, sports, arts, STEM courses for different grades on different days, in different languages. If a parent looks for sport events offered for grade P2 children only Mondays. I hope the event booking component has a usable solution to this. My first thought was multiple selection checkboxes which is common in shop plugins.

Regards,
Chris

Hi Chris

Evens Booking, unfortunately, not a shopping cart extension and not has advanced filter module like in some shopping cart systems

So for your need, I think you will need to customize the code. Instead of having on dropdown for selecting multiple categories, you should make separate dropdowns, each dropdown for a filter option (categories, grades, languages, days...)

As mentioned, it's not an easy job, so you will need to find someone who has good experience with PHP/Joomla programming skill to work on this development

Regards,

Tuan